The AMICUS project was designed to promote scholarly networking in a topical area, motif recognition in texts, including its automation. Prior to doing so however it is necessary to show the theoretical underpinnings of the research idea. My argument is that evidence from different disciplines amounts to fragmented pieces of a bigger picture. By compiling them like pieces of a puzzle, one can see how the concept of formulaity applies to folklore texts and scholarly communication alike. Regardless of the actual name of the concept (e.g. motif, function, canonical form), what matters is that document parts and whole documents can be characterized by standard sequences of content elements, such formulaic expressions enabling higher-level document indexing and classification by machine learning, plus document retrieval. Information filtering plays a key role in the proposed technology.